In a way, ideation is constantly happening in a company as it continuously assesses its competitive situation and decides whether to continue or move to something new. This article focuses on ideation at the very early stages, when the question is often what to do in the first place.
The stages of the whole process can be thought of as:
Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test
The preliminary stages are to identify a problem (empathise and define). For this, I’d propose going through the business plan, which asks a number of questions about the market, the value chain, and the core issue at hand that has not been solved.
Which market? Any you care to work in. As well as being a specialist provider in your employment, you are a specialist consumer in a range of others, so don’t limit yourself to what you supply. For example, if you work in a hospital and you deal with referrals from GPs, you will have a pretty good knowledge of hospital referrals, but also the GP referral system, patient journeys, and the interface between GPs and hospitals.
Once a specific problem that you feel you know enough about has been identified, ideation can begin. It is an emphatically creative process, and as such works when associations are allowed to run freely. From the single point of a defined problem, expand out to include every idea that relates to it.
During the Diverge period, nothing can be refused or rejected- there can be no criticism at all. Ideas and assumptions can and should be included, however wild. And if there is a team of people working on this, there can be no hierarchy at this stage, so that everyone feels confident to contribute their ideas freely.
A method to help drive divergence is opposite thinking. In this, the norms that define components of the problem are presented in opposite form. For example, imagine you had been solving for faster travel in 1900, when the norms were travel by sea (water resistance slows you) or by land (capacity of horse limits you). In 1901 Henry Ford presented the opposite on land; what about a human without a horse? In 1903 the Wright Brothers attacked an even bigger assumption and said, “what about air?”.
If you thought that the airplane and car had solved the faster transport problem, then again, some opposite thinking would help. What if they hadn’t? Hovercrafts dealt with water resistance in the 1950s, and today space flight is being examined to challenge the idea that travel involves the passenger moving to the destination and not the other way around.
Once you have reached a stage where ideas have led to ideas and there is a huge range of individual components, the process moves to convergence. First, without removing anything, put components together into groups that might work as systems. Then start to think about how the systems would work from a number of perspectives; user journey, cash journey, operating support, mechanics, etc. As ideas don’t work, you can move forwards by choosing those that do, and refining the analysis of them alone, until you converge on some solutions that work. The one that is right for you is the one that requires inputs that you can meaningfully provide, in terms of energy, capital and expertise.
A book to read on this is Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. It’s the most famous book on the subject of ideation and uses the ERRC curve as a visual tool to work out what needs to be done differently. Read the article about ERRC for more detail.
A company famous for its ideation process is Ideo, in Palo Alto, which has been at the forefront of consumer design for the last forty years. They have a flat structure, specialist ideation teams and methods, and a long list of products. The principles they use for ideation in design work just as well applied to business.
Prototyping and testing are the stages that bring a proposed solution to market as cheaply as possible, by letting the customer contribute to the ideation process with feedback about what they do and don’t like- usually given in the form of uptake and use metrics. Given the inevitability of this subsequent stage, it is worth including in the ideation process a plan for how consumer testing will be done. It will be necessary for defining the investment milestones, and it will allow your plan to force you into remaining sensitive to customer wants.